The Substance of Fire ought to be one of the major critical favorites of 1997. It won’t be, but is worth seeking out while it lingers in town. It’s an adaptation of the acclaimed drama by Jon Robin Baitz about Jewish guilt and familial war. Baitz was 26 when he…
On the festival tour that helped the necrophiliac Kissed net prerelease praise everywhere from the Atlantic Monthly to Newsweek, writer-director Lynne Stopkewich said she thought independent films should be judged by their ingenuity and daring rather than by the size of their budgets. As arts-world stump speeches go, it’s a…
Sidney Lumet has had enough ups and downs in his long, prolific career that it’s never safe to count him out . . . even after two disappointing films in a row, A Stranger Among Us (1992) and Guilty as Sin (1993). Even the greatest directors frequently falter in their…
Okay, metaphor buffs: An “albino alligator” is what the other alligators in a group send out as a sacrificial lamb. Members of a second group of ‘gators attack the albino, and the first group violently finishes off its competition. Once this is explained in the movie Albino Alligator, you know…
In Children of the Revolution, Judy Davis plays Joan Fraser, an Aussie communist who sleeps with Joseph Stalin–their tryst kills him–and, unbeknown to anyone, has his child. Davis takes her character through almost 40 years of agitprop hellfire, and she has scaled her performance big. The movie, however, is rather…
In The Fifth Element, the all-knowing, all-powerful Supreme Being of the Universe turns out to be Leeloo (Milla Jovovich), an orange-haired babe in a skimpy, Band-Aid-thin mod outfit who speaks in a kind of Slavic scat and cries a lot. It’s as if the filmmakers started out to make a…
You and I both may have complex feelings about reproductive rights, but the lucky folks to the right and left of us don’t–they’re blessed with absolute, black-and-white knowledge. The movies, with few exceptions, have steered clear of this debate, for the same reason that many of us tend to avoid…
For the fourth time in as many years, Arizona Film Society presents the Saguaro Film Festival. As in previous years, this year’s selections are a mixed bag, but a rewarding one–along with the usual batch of slackers-trying-to-get-laid comedies, there are such real gems as an enchanting, imaginative riff on the…
New-to-movies subjects are hard to come by, but Traveller has one: the inbred world of Irish grifters living in the backwoods of the American rural South. Clannish con artists descended from Irish tinkers, they fan out across the countryside pulling bogus home-repair jobs on unsuspecting, mostly elderly folk, and rake…
If you’re hankering to see a movie that sends up swinging ’60s London and Carnaby Street and vintage James Bond movies, don’t bother to check out Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. What the movie mostly sends up is its star and screenwriter, Mike Myers. That’s not all bad: Myers…
Volcano is set in Los Angeles, and audiences get high watching the city crash and burn. For L.A. haters, Volcano could prove a peak experience. You don’t even have to hate L.A. to enjoy it–love/hate will do. That’s why the film closes with Randy Newman’s “I Love L.A.,” a facetious…
Paradise Road opens inside a posh British club in Singapore, February 1942. Beautiful young women dance with their uniformed sweethearts, while Colonel Blimp types and their wives cluck with amusement at the idea of the short, nearsighted Japanese getting the upper hand against the mighty Brits. Then the bombs start…
Remember this joke? Question: Want to know how you can lose 10 pounds of ugly fat? Answer: Cut off your head. Well, according to the press kit for 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag, the average human head–dead and drained of blood–weighs 4.4 pounds. I can’t imagine the heads of…
Das Boot, the 1981 German nautical spectacular, is now being rereleased as an extended three-and-a-half-hour director’s cut. With an hour of new footage drawn from a six-hour German-TV version, the movie now plays more gracefully and clearly. If 60 more minutes of underwater rocking and rolling from depth charges and…
Kevin Smith is an impassioned jokester. The young writer-director double-whammies the audience by filling in his stick figures with thick brush strokes. His first film, Clerks, was a no-budget goof featuring an entire miniature universe of slacker goons, but its main protagonist was a sweetly jerky, lovelorn convenience-store employee who…
A parked sports car with steamed-up windows rocks from side to side. There’s a lot of sex in That Old Feeling, but that’s about as graphic as it gets–the film is rated PG-13. That was okay with me–I wasn’t panting for a close-up of Dennis Farina and Bette Midler getting…
The Australian film Angel Baby is about the love affair between a young man and a young woman, both attractive and intelligent, and both afflicted with fairly severe mental illness–when they meet, they compare slash scars on their wrists. The sweet-souled, exuberant Harry (John Lynch) sees Kate (Jacqueline McKenzie) in…
Film actors are generally said to have good chemistry or no chemistry. But bad chemistry in movies does exist, and a sleep-inducer called Inventing the Abbotts is a case in point. In ascending order of age, Liv Tyler, Jennifer Connelly and Joanna Going play Pamela, Eleanor and Alice Abbott, well-off…
When Val Kilmer walked away from the Batman franchise, it was only a matter of time before he offered up his own competing brand. The Saint isn’t just his answer to Batman–it’s a full-length commercial for all the Saint movies to come. There’s a breezy effrontery in the ploy; Kilmer…
Over the past five years, action star Jean-Claude Van Damme has become one of America’s leading importers of foreign talent. In 1993, he hired Hong Kong action ace John Woo to direct Hard Target. For last year’s Maximum Risk, he brought over Ringo Lam. And now he has used a…
There’s one stand that every film about the quagmire in Northern Ireland is willing to take: that there’s been enough killing. Sometimes, like in A Prayer for the Dying, it’s said out loud–“Thur’s bin enoof killin’.” Sometimes, as in The Crying Game, In the Name of the Father, Some Mother’s…
Lars von Trier is, perhaps consciously and defiantly, one of the least-commercial, brilliant directors in the world. His best-known movie, the 1992 Zentropa, and his earlier The Element of Crime both open with hypnotic voice-overs, seemingly daring us to succumb to sleep before the credits are even over. Nonetheless, if…
